Pricing learning solutions and courses is hard - as much art as science. Without a doubt one of the most complex parts of any B2B learning solutions bid is pricing, especially where the learning solution has size, complexity or scale. As learning professionals, who often care more about learning outcomes than commercial outcomes, pricing is often an uncomfortable topic. But here is the thing....
If you don't win the deal you won't have the opportunity to realise the learning impact. Worst still if you win, but lose money on the deal, you will be in an even worse position than not winning at all.
We have had the privilege of partnering with universities, short course providers, associations, consultants and business schools to bid on and deliver many B2B, enterprise and government learning solutions. These solutions range from single cohort custom programs, to high scale government initiatives, and organisation-wide talent development solutions. While I could talk for hours about the ins and outs of pricing B2B learning solutions, I’ll just start with 10 tips from hard learned lessons from many winning and losing bids. And let's be honest, the losing ones have the best lessons.
Price early, build a model and iterate
Know your source of value to the customer
Understand your true cost of design and delivery
Be open and transparent with partners from the beginning
Be careful where and how you apply margins
Question promised volumes and scale
Remove complexity from high volume opportunities
Choose wisely between cohort vs participant based pricing
Build in recurring revenue and increasing margins over time
Include your assumptions and defend your scope of engagement
Read on for more detail if you wish.....
1. Price early, build a model and iterate
What’s the first thing you do when someone sends you a proposal? Flick to the pricing page then read the rest of the document? Why? Because price (the cost to the buyer) is the denominator of the value equation. Price is the lens through which return on investment is evaluated. The prism through which all other considerations are benchmarked. It may not be the primary consideration but it’s nearly always at the top of the list, and it’s the most important consideration when evaluating alternatives.
So why is it that many learning providers leave pricing until the last minute? Treating it as an afterthought once the learning design is complete. I mean, who hasn’t been involved in a bid where last minute pricing has resulted in a deal so expensive you can’t possibly win it? But you submit it anyway because it’s all too late to reengineer the approach? In reality you probably just wasted hundreds of hours of many peoples’ time because you didn’t want to talk about dollars upfront. If price is one of the first things a buyer considers, why not make it one of the first things you consider in the bid process?
So my first tip is “Price early and make your pricing model the centre of your bid process”. Begin developing your pricing model as soon as you have a general understanding of the clients needs and your potential approach. The process of building a pricing model helps you understand the value the customer is seeking and your costs and processes for delivering that value. It’s not only an important output, it's a tool for analysing the opportunity and your fit to that opportunity. It can also help you identify areas for cost optimisations that could be the difference between winning and losing that bid. A good model lets you play with variables and make decisions as you go, and may even help you decide not to bid at all.
Remember that your first pricing model will rarely be your final one - expect to and be prepared to iterate multiple times as your understanding of the opportunity evolves.
If you don't have the right skills on your bid team to build a model, then you don't have the right bid team. Bring in the spreadsheet guru from day one, it's not just their excel skills you want, it's their critical thinking and their annoying habit of questioning all your assumptions as they build out the models.
Leaving pricing to the last minute is a critical mistake. Don't do it.
2. Know your source of value to the customer
Successful pricing isn't just about covering your costs - it's about understanding what value the client is truly seeking and if it aligns to the value you can deliver. Knowing your true source of value to the market and customer is important.
Is it your brand reputation?
Your unique methodology or learning experience?
Access to specific subject matter experts?
The performance improvements you can bring?
Your delivery expertise and operational excellence?
Your scaleability and reach?
Different clients value different aspects, and understanding the value they are seeking from a particular opportunity is critical when pricing. Knowing which parts of your value proposition and the value the customer is seeking helps you price more strategically and increase margins on the things that matter most to them.
Part of this assessment is an honest and critical analysis of what value the customer is seeking:
Are they delivering this learning as an employee value proposition? How important is your brand in this?
Is the learning critical to the strategic business goals? If so, which goals, and how do they align to your capabilities?
What unique subject matter expertise do you bring and how valuable is it? Or do you have the same expertise as other institutions?
Is this mostly an outsource play and they are interested more in delivery and operational expertise than specific content?
Is this a government buyer mostly looking to deliver on a policy promise within the allocated budget with the least amount of headaches?
Undertaking a critical value analysis and comparing how your value aligns to the value the customer is seeking can help you build a value based pricing model and maintain high margins where you offer something unique to the client. It can also help you identify the areas you are not differentiated from your competitors and price those areas more aggressively.
3. Understand your true cost of design and delivery
Many learning providers underestimate their actual costs, leading to unprofitable deals. While value based pricing is important it should not be at the expense of basic pricing principles - cover your costs with an acceptable margin. Common oversights include:
Underestimating design time and the customers' expectations of bespoke design elements
Underestimating faculty or expert preparation time
Overlooking administrative overhead
Failing to account for stakeholder management
Ongoing account management to realise the value
Cost of internal marketing and comms to get people to do the learning
A special note on client management.
Client and delivery management time is consistently the most underestimated cost component in learning solutions.
Beyond the formal delivery hours lies a mountain of coordination, meetings, stakeholder management, and administrative tasks. Enterprise and government clients in particular have high expectations and bureaucratic inefficiency that lead to increased costs that can quickly exceed other cost elements and lead to a reduction in profits or worse still, losses. Build explicit client management time into your pricing model - typically 15-25% of total project hours for standard clients, and potentially 30-40% for complex organisational or government clients. Remember that the most demanding clients rarely identify themselves as such during the sales process but the warning signs are always there!
Track your actual costs on previous projects to develop realistic benchmarks. Be particularly careful with custom content development, which frequently exceeds initial estimates. Also, distinguish between fixed costs (those that don't change regardless of participant numbers) and variable costs (those that scale with volume) to ensure your pricing model accounts for both appropriately.
4. Partner with caution and be transparent
Partnering is essential to crafting winning bids. When it comes to learning solutions you need a mix of learning design, learning technology, subject matter expertise, facilitation, evaluation, coaching and delivery capability and capacity. Few organisations have all of these inhouse and at their finger tips when needed. Partnering is the obvious answer. But the more partners you have, the more pieces you need to cut the pie into….and each partner always wants more pie. Not only do they want more pie, they always seem to forget that the buyer is only willing to fund a small pie, not a pie big enough to feed the many partners in your bid.
That said, partnering is truly important in putting together a winning bid but it needs to be managed carefully:
Be clear about the role of each partner and the value they deliver. Not all partners are as important to the bid as others.
Know the difference between a bid-partner and a vendor or sub-contractor. A partner helps shape the value, a sub-contractor or vendor adds value through a predetermined cost rate - just build them into your model, they don't need to be up front and centre in the bid.
Have a strong lead partner that keeps the bid on track. This lead partner should be generous, yet fair and put the customer at the centre of the bid.
Know when to take a partner out of the bid because the numbers just aren't stacking up.
When partnering, discuss margin expectations, cost structures, and who bears which risks.
Create a shared pricing document that outlines each partner's contribution and compensation.
Address difficult questions early and don't be scared to talk about the elephant in the room when you think one partner is over pricing compared to the others.
Don't let partners use the opportunity to pay for underlying business costs like product development and other things on their business wish list.
Transparency builds trust and prevents last-minute pricing disagreements that can derail promising opportunities.
If partners are unwilling to have these transparent conversations early, consider it a warning sign about future collaboration challenges.
5. Be careful where and how you apply margins
Applying a standard markup percentage across all components of your solution can be problematic. Clients are increasingly sophisticated in analysing pricing breakdowns and may challenge high margins on certain elements.
Consider varying your margins based on the value delivered and competitive factors.
For example, you might apply lower margins on delivery components, while maintaining higher margins on unique intellectual property, branded certifications or specialised expertise. This approach allows you to protect overall profitability while demonstrating cost-effectiveness in areas where clients are most price-sensitive.
And as an extension to the considerations related to partnering, if you are the lead partner be careful applying margins to your partners margins - this will blow out your price. Apply margins to your components only. Being the lead partner comes with extra responsibilities, and value, and you should be rewarded for that. Rather than applying a blanket margin across your sub-contractor or partner's work, add a separate line item for vendor, project or partner management to your model, and understand the true cost of partnering and apply a fair margin to your work.
Remember applying a fair margin does not equal an acceptable price. You might need to go all the way back and look at your cost model and rethink your solution. Another reason to price and model as you go.
6. Question promised volumes and scale
You should always take into account economies of scale when pricing and use this as a way to deliver higher value and a more competitive price. However when clients dangle the promise of large participant volumes or multiple cohorts, maintain a healthy skepticism. Many organisations overestimate initial uptake or fail to secure internal commitment beyond the first phase.
Ask some critical questions in the bid phase to help determine if the opportunity is as big as the client is saying:
Is the learning required or optional?
If optional, why would the regular employee do it?
Does it have C-suite level sponsorship?
Is the client willing to commit to volume or are they being risk averse?
How is the learning going to be rolled out?
Do people or departments have to pay to do the learning? And are they really willing to?
How many people already have the skill the learning addresses? How many people really need the skill?
Remember the total addressable audience for a learning solution is rarely the actual audience size. It can be as little as 10% if there is not the right organisational context for learner engagement.
Structure your pricing to protect yourself if promises of scale don't materialise. Consider offering volume-based discounts that activate only when certain thresholds are actually achieved rather than promised. Alternatively, propose a higher price for initial cohorts with automatic discounts for subsequent ones. Where you are skeptical, make sure you recover all your upfront costs in the design phase. This approach rewards clients who deliver on volume promises while protecting your margins if they don't.
Clients always over estimate both the volume of uptake and the speed of uptake. Be realistic in your assumptions and above all structure your model and costs to protect yourself.
7. Remove complexity from high volume opportunities
For truly high-volume learning solutions, consider fundamentally different delivery approaches rather than simply discounting your standard model.
Think about how you separate faculty expertise from ongoing facilitation. Look at lower cost delivery resources for high volume programs. Highly paid experts are not only too expensive to deliver the same thing hundreds of times, they are unlikely to be available or wanting to do so.
Using technology and online mediums to support both the learning experience and to help scale the operations and automate tasks like application, registration, payment, delivery and evaluation.
Developing self-paced digital components that complement live sessions, or designing peer learning elements that reduce faculty contact hours. The key is building a solution where your costs don't scale linearly with participant numbers. Digital components typically have higher upfront costs but significantly lower incremental costs, making them ideal for high-volume situations when amortized across all participants.
Above all if you are looking to scale, keep your learning design approach simple - a cool but complex learning design for a single cohort won't scale to a 100 cohorts. When designing your course keep your delivery resources, operating model and technology capabilities front and centre. Don't design the program in a vacuum. It won't scale and you will end up throwing extra unaccounted for hours at managing unexpected complexity.
8. Choose wisely between cohort vs participant based pricing
The structure of your pricing can significantly impact both your revenue predictability and the client's perception of value. Cohort-based pricing (charging a fixed fee regardless of exact participant numbers within a range) provides revenue certainty but may appear expensive for smaller groups.
Participant-based pricing (charging per person) seems more flexible to clients but introduces revenue uncertainty for you.
Consider the client's internal charging model - if they allocate costs to business units based on headcount, participant-based pricing may align better with their processes. For many enterprise solutions, a hybrid model works best - a base cohort fee plus a per-participant charge above a certain threshold. This protects your base value while offering upside. Remember in your price model you should treat that extra revenue as upside, and plan for it not to eventuate - it’s cream on top if it does.
9. Build in recurring revenue and increasing margins over time
The most sustainable B2B learning relationships evolve from one-off programs to ongoing partnerships. Structure your initial pricing to facilitate this transition.
Where you know there is volume and longevity in an opportunity, structure your pricing approach so your margins increase over time.
Amortise upfront costs into the cohort or per learner fee, and charge a high margin on these elements. This way your customer sees you as a low upfront cost option and you'll make larger margins once you reach the payback period.
These types of models work best with online courses and government initiatives that have locked in volume through required or compliance based learning because online has low variable costs, and required learning locks in long term volumes.
As above in tip 6, be cautious of promised volumes - but if the volume and commitment is there you should absolutely consider a model more akin to SaaS than traditional learning, the long-term upside is worth it and just good business.
10. Include your assumptions and defend your scope
Pricing itself is rarely the cause of unprofitable projects, it's a failure to explicitly state assumptions and enforce project scope. I've lost count of the amount of times I have seen educators over service clients out of a sense of obligation, or merely because they didn't go back and check what the customer bought. We all want to make our customers happy but it should be within the framework of what they bought and are willing to pay extra for.
Your pricing model rests on a foundation of assumptions about the project scope, client involvement, and delivery conditions.
Make these assumptions explicit in your proposal rather than leaving them unstated. Clearly articulate what's included (and importantly, what's not), how many revision cycles are covered, what client resources are expected, and what conditions would trigger additional charges. Detailing assumptions protects you from scope creep and gives clients clarity about boundaries. Despite popular opinion, bid evaluators actually like this clarity. It builds trust and ensures they have the right internal resources to work alongside you. It's when they don't know your assumptions that they more often ask for things that are not included.
Your pricing model is the best source to detail your assumptions and scope - every cell, variable and equation in it has underlying assumptions that should be detailed. Include them in your bid response. You don't need to be rude about it - all assumptions can be framed positively.
When you are in the delivery phase, defend your scope and ask for more money if a client wants extra value and services. Remember it's rarely the assumptions in the pricing model that are the problem, it's the failure to enforce scope and a fear of saying no.
Wrap Up
Mastering the art and science of pricing B2B learning solutions is critical for both commercial success and realising learning impact. Only winning bids have a learning impact. By pricing early, understanding your true value, calculating real costs, managing partnerships transparently, and structuring deals strategically, you position yourself to win bids that are both profitable and deliverable.
Remember that pricing isn't just about numbers — it's a way of thinking about an opportunity and creates the foundation for sustainable relationships where both parties succeed. The most successful learning providers don't just deliver great learning experiences, they also build financially sound partnerships that allow them to continue innovating and delivering impact over time.
When you get pricing right, everyone wins - your organisation secures fair compensation for its expertise, and your clients receive exceptional value for their investment.
Put pricing discipline at the start and heart of your next learning solution bid - you won’t regret it.
Looking for a partner on your next B2B opportunity?
Guroo Learning partners with leading educators to help deliver scalable learning solutions to enterprise and government clients. We complement your education and subject matter expertise with our Guroo Academy learning platform and our learning design and delivery expertise to help empower you to deliver learning at scale, and build recurring revenue streams for your institution, business school, association or consultancy. If you are wanting to scale up your impact, respond to higher volume opportunities and change up your business model, get in touch today.
Comments